At 5:00AM this morning, I woke for no apparent reason. Four seconds later, the house began to rattle. It was like a huge truck had driven by, shaking our home… except there was no truck, or anything like it. Earthquake, I thought. That was an earthquake. It was brief and didn’t continue so I promptly … Read more
Newsweek recently published an interesting piece about the decline of creativity in America by authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. In May, a professor at the College of William & Mary, Kyun Hee Kim, analyzed 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Named for the psychologist who created it 50 years ago — E. Paul … Read more
I missed this one: In June, Nancy Frazier O’Brien at Catholic News Service wrote about a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the amount of federal funding given to organizations that perform or promote abortion. Between 2002 and 2009 — during the Bush administration, in other words — the number was a staggering $967 … Read more
Here’s an interesting — and alarming — article from The Independent. One third of healthy young men between 18 and 25 have abnormal sperm counts. And the sperm they do produce is often of poor quality. Studies show that “only between 5 and 15 per cent of their sperm is, on average, good enough to … Read more
It’s a long-held belief that the phases of the moon affect people’s behaviors. That’s why it’s significant that a new study demonstrates that crime and violence do not go up during a full moon. According to USA Today‘s Dan Vergano, a research team studied the crime data of San Antonio, Texas, from 2001 to 2005, … Read more
On June 9th, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that Dr. Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor at the the University of Illinois, was fired for teaching that homosexual acts violate the natural moral law during his class on Catholicism. A student (not in the class) wrote to the head of the religion department on behalf … Read more
According to The Guardian, archeologists working in Norfolk, England, have discovered “78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools” in an area of sediment previously believed to have been formed 840,000 or 950,000 years ago. This means the earliest humans were living in modern-day Britain at least 80,000 years earlier than … Read more
This excerpt comes from Berry’s essay “The Body and The Earth” in his collection The Art of the Commonplace: It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as … Read more
Today is Canada Day — and I’m in Canada waving around a maple leaf with a bunch of other Canucks (and a few Americans). Celebrations here are similar to Independence Day in the U.S. — flags, speeches, cook outs, fireworks, parades. Americans enjoy putting Canada down (when they think of Canada at all) because they … Read more
The Maldavian prince Stephen the Great won his first big victory over the Turks more than 500 years ago, and he celebrated by having a monastery built and hiring artisans to cover it in beautiful murals. According to Peter Wortsman in Sunday’s New York Times travel section, Stephen kept erecting monasteries and filling them with … Read more
Do we need a book telling us that monogamy isn’t natural, because our ancestors 8,000 years ago didn’t mate for life? Apparently so. A new book called Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha has just been released in the U.S., and while I haven’t read it, … Read more
Emma Silvers, an editorial fellow at Salon, has finally seen the light on popular hipster store American Apparel. Now the largest clothing manufacturer in the U.S., American Apparel opened in 2003 in Los Angeles after a short stint as a wholesale T-shirt supplier. Within two years, it had 53 retails stores in five countries. Its … Read more
Rather than quote from the esteemed poet, essayist, farmer, and conservationist, I thought I’d post this short video of Wendell Berry at a talk in Arlington, Virginia, on May 4, 2010. The question posed to him related to our dependence on cheap oil. Let me know what you think. (Sorry, but they’re not allowing embeded … Read more
The Daily Telegraph reports that theologian Gunnar Samuelsson from Gothenburg University believes Jesus wasn’t nailed to a cross at all — his ‘crucifixion’ is based on artistic renderings and Christian tradition rather than actual antique texts: Mr Samuelsson, who has written a 400-page thesis after studying the original texts, said: “The problem is descriptions of … Read more
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press/Smithsonian Magazine, 40% of Americans think Jesus will return to Earth by 2050. Telephone and online interviews were conducted with 1,546 adults this past April. The Daily Telegraph highlighted some of the other findings: By mid century, 71 per cent … Read more
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press/Smithsonian Magazine, 40% of Americans think Jesus will return to Earth by 2050. Telephone and online interviews were conducted with 1,546 adults this past April. The Daily Telegraph highlighted some of the other findings: By mid century, 71 per cent … Read more
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press/Smithsonian Magazine, 40% of Americans think Jesus will return to Earth by 2050. Telephone and online interviews were conducted with 1,546 adults this past April. The Daily Telegraph highlighted some of the other findings: By mid century, 71 per cent … Read more
Men are still the major breadwinners in most families, but over the past few decades they’ve been expected to pull more weight at home. Wives now ask husbands to help around the house, share in child-care, and take leadership in areas other than career and finances. Men are finding this very stressful, according to an … Read more
I posted a while back about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her new book, Nomad: From Islam to America. On the Ms. Magazine Blog this past Monday, Rafia Zakaria focuses on an interesting new development in Ali’s views of Islam and women. Ali, as you may recall, is Somali-born and a former Dutch parliamentarian who became … Read more
I’ve written about the problem of obesity in the past. It’s an epidemic in North America now as we all know, and with one look around, it’s not hard to see why. But let’s say you want to lose weight — what do you do? There are so many diets out there, it’s really tough … Read more
